Business / Technology

Q: I was thinking of upgrading my Windows program from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium.

I have a Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor report indicating a high level of compatibility and six issues I should address before making the change. They seem minor: uninstalling a hardware diagnostic tool, a few program updates, and an AMD program about which no status is indicated.

Assuming I take care of these things before or after I make the move, could you guess how difficult it would be or how long it might take to download, install and bring the new system to functional operation?

— Ptr

A: Upgrading an operating system is always a little bit of a gamble. Usually, the process goes smoothly. But it's always possible you might run into troubles, especially if you have obscure hardware or software that hasn't been designed strictly according to Windows standards.

Still, I strongly recommend doing the upgrade.

As for the download time, that depends on how fast your Internet service is.

As for installation time, figure on about an hour, but most of that time it will be doing its thing and you can be miniature golfing.

Q: I have known of the idea of having the "ultimate" portable computer by putting your operating system and data on a thumb drive and just plugging it into whatever hardware was available for some time.

The idea is the borrowed computer will boot off the thumb drive and use it for all your work.

I thought it was a neat idea, but I don't travel that much anymore so I just filed it away.

A few days ago I heard an interesting idea, which was to put your browser on the thumb drive. For some reason, they said it would have to be a "portable" version of the browser.

Supposedly, then, all the cookies, data mining, malware, etc. from an online session would go to the thumb drive, and the hard drive would never see it or be seen by it.

What I am considering is putting XP and IE7 on the thumb, using it to surf, download and cleanse. Then I'd reboot off the hard drive, reinsert the thumb drive and do the file copies. Would it work?

— Keith Saxe

A: Yes, you certainly can use a flash drive to run your operating system. But there are some considerations to be aware of.

First, you'll want to check your computer to see if it can boot from a flash drive. Most made within the past couple of years will do so. But if the computer is older it may not.

If that's the case, there may be a BIOS upgrade that will solve the problem. If you do have a BIOS that permits booting from a flash drive, you'll need to go into the BIOS configuration program and set it to look to the a bootable flash drive before the hard drive.

OK. Now, if you're going to be booting Windows XP, you'll need a flash drive between 256 megabytes and 2 gigabytes in size. You can't go larger than that, since Windows XP uses the FAT-16 file system, which is limited to handling flash drive only up to 2 gigabytes.

And you'll want to download a utility to trim down the size of the Windows XP installation. Go here to download BartPE: /www.nu2.nu/.

Many users make a bootable flash drive for emergencies. If you're going to be using yours on a regular basis, however, it's important to remember that one limitation is flash drives can wear out with too much writing to the drive. Reliable numbers are difficult to find, but I see the upper end of memory-write operations at around 100,000.

That's plenty long enough for most users, but if you're regularly running an operating system — which does a lot of writing to the drive — or a large database application, you might hit that ceiling. Worse still, there's no gas gauge on flash drives, so you won't know when you're approaching the drive's limit.

So if it was me, I'd rely on the bootable flash drive as an emergency backup.

Questions for Patrick Marshall may be sent by email to pmarshall@seattletimes.com or pgmarshall@pgmarshall.net, or by mail at Q&A/Technology, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/

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